This entry has been written from an ‘out of character’ perspective to ramble briefly on a couple of things.

I’ll keep this one short-ish and spit out a few things.

Firstly, for the first time in awhile that I’ve noticed, the Amarr miltia is making a push on warzone control! Very happy to see that happening as it shows signs that FW remains alive and well. The Minmatar have been sitting strongly up in tier 4 for awhile now and recently became the first faction to reavh tier 5 post-Retribution, so its good to see some fight back although I’ll admit to not knowing the cause. Some speculate that organised LP farming remains a thing in FW, so it could be that the farmers have shifted focus allowing Amarr to push back. Or its something else, who knows. As it stands Amarr are a sliver away from breaking into tier 3 as the Minnies are down to tier 2.

Second thing, I’m going to blame Fanfest and CCP’s marketing frenzy for this, but I just went and bought a PS3 off eBay. Interestingly there seems to be plenty of people out there buying PS3’s despite the PS4 being officially announced and maybe 6 months away, so expect to pay about £100+ for a slimline version or £80+ for the older ‘Piano’ style. Curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided to go check out Dust514 for myself, I’ve been toying with the idea for awhile and it has just been getting more tempting. I found CCP’s plans for the future intriguing so I expect I’ll get my moneys worth out this thing over the long term. Or I can try to resell it for peanuts a year for now. 😉

Finally, I realised that I didn’t get around to talking much about Fanfest’s EVE keynote. It was nice to hear about the CCP 10 year ‘journey’ of course, although I had heard a previous presentation a few years back so it wasn’t all ‘new’ to me, my wife hadn’t though and won;t be the only one ofc. then we had CCP Unifex doing a year in review bit which had some nice observations in it, including of PVP in low sec about doubled post-Retribution and looks to have stayed at that level, which is great. It is pretty much proven in every way that Retribution has been the most successful expansion in a long, long time both in new attracting new players and an upswing in player activity.

So the new stuff. ‘Colonisation’ is set to be the thematic word around EVE development for some time to come as it will be CCP’s theme for the next ‘several’ expansions. We are going to be able to build ‘super stargates’ that will lead to completely new areas of space. I am so glad that CCP didn’t surprise me and declare that we would be able to build stargates between existing systems. The players would wreck the map inside of a year linking every system to everywhere else! So no, it will be building doorways into new systems that CCP want to be unlike any currently in game. In fact, they are deliberately not doing this straight away so that they have more time to ‘develop their ideas’ on what this new space will be.

That is the part that makes me optimistic about this direction. CCP really do want to bring something wholly new into EVE through this feature, more of the same just isn’t going to be enough. My concern of course is that they won’t be able to come up with something that meets this lofty goal, but here’s hoping they do! I don’t expect to see any of this stuff until Winter 2014 at the earliest. Winter 2013 is probably going to be a further industrial revamp with maybe some new mining mechanics if the prototyping presentation was anything to go by. More industrial shake-ups are coming most likely. So going into 2014 I guess we’ll see something being done with the sov mechanics, but I get the impression that CCP are hoping null sec industry buffing will bring more targets into null for small gangs to prey on. Will that be enough without tampering with the sov grind? Probably not.

EVE Occulus Rift thingy then. EVR is an interesting prototype, a dog fighting version of EVE fighter piloting using the Occulus virtual reality kit. This would be pretty damned amazing if it became linked into EVE, but I don’t think that is likely any time soon. We will probably see this turn into a standalone product that CCP puts out at some point, if it leads anywhere. My impression is that Hilmar thinks its a cool thing to show off but that he is not sold on the business case for it, if there actually is one. Styill it drew a great deal of media attention and got a lot of people excited. Ultimately its market will be determined by how many people buy the Occulus Rift I guess.

So interesting things, if deliberately a little light on specifics in places. CCP are clearly getting more ambitious with the EVE vision and plans again, which is a very welcome attitude to see again.

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